1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to previewing collections of songs and, more specifically, to systems and methods for generating thumbnails and highlights from an audio track.
2. Background Information
The number and size of multimedia databases and collections, whether personal or commercial, have grown rapidly in recent years with the advent of compact disks (hereinafter “CD's”), MP3 disks, affordable personal computer systems, the Internet, and online media sharing websites. Being able to efficiently browse these files and to quickly discern their content is an important aid to users who desire to make listening and/or purchasing decisions from a database or collection of many separate audiovisual works.
Song owners may wish to listen to a particular song but cannot remember the title and/or the artist. For an owner with hundreds of songs, finding a particular song may require listening to all or portions of dozens of songs before the desired song is found. While some CD players have a feature whereby a listener can listen to the first ten or twenty seconds of a song, the beginning of a song may be an instrumental prelude that is not representative of the content or lyrics of the song. One system that permits a potential purchaser to listen to a short clip of music is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,247,130 to Fritsch, entitled “Distribution of Musical Products by a Web Site Vendor Over the Internet,” the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. Alternatively, a potential purchaser of a song album or CD listens to entire songs on the collection before being able to preview a particular song or songs of interest in order to make a buying decision.
One technique whereby users can browse a collection of soundtracks and songs is to create and catalog short samples of each audio track and/or song in the collection. One approach to the creation of an audio sample is through the identification of a repeated portion of the song, such as a chorus or a refrain. Such a method is described in Mark A. Bartsch and Gregory H. Wakefield, “To Catch a Chorus: Using Chroma-Based Representations for Audio Thumbnailing,” Proceedings Of IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, pp 15-18, New York, October 2001, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference. Another technique for indexing and retrieving songs by finding repeating patterns in the songs is through a dictionary-based approach, as described in Hsuan-Huei Shih, et al., “Comparison of Dictionary-Based Approaches to Automatic Repeating Melody Extraction,” Proceedings of SPIE: Storage and Retrieval for Media Databases, vol 4767, pp 306-317, San Jose, January 2002, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
Yet another method by which a song is summarized for purposes of indexing and subsequent recognition and retrieval is by transcription of the lyrics of the song. The indexing system distinguishes between the voice and instrumental portions of the audio track, a method for which is described in Adam L. Berenzweig and Daniel P. W. Ellis, “Locating Singing Voice Segments Within Music Signals,” Proceedings of IEEE Workshop on Applications of Signal Processing to Audio and Acoustics, pp 119-122, New York, October 2001, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.